Trigger Dance - Softcover

Glancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932511368 ISBN 13: 9780932511362

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1991

Synopsis

1990 Winner of the Mildren P. Nilon Award for Minority Fiction

In Trigger Dance, her first collection of stories, Diane Glancy takes us to uneasy places where both the environment and the characters are at risk, where even the animals grieve. Sometimes the author's voice, sometimes the voices of the characters, tell us about their migrations, symbolic or literal. Diane Glancy's characters walk in two worlds and try to build a middle ground between white and native cultures. They are the offspring of those who survived the Trail of Tears. Some of the young men dance at powwows in tune with the dead. Filo and Parnetta buy a fridge at the Hardware Store on Muskogee Street, in Tahleqah, Oklahoma. Farther west, near Chickasha, Keyo can't read, while Joseph Sink, an Indian hermit, learns a word a day. Anna America remembers her shortcomings as a mother and her hard life as she waits in the Northeastern Cherokee County Shelter for her wings to unfold so she can leave this earth. In the title story, Roan mourns the fact that human beings have the power to destroy the earth. He's astonished that creation and cremation could be so closely linked. Even his father, when he feels death approach, demands to be cremated because "it's autumn in outer space." Roan's final vision in the sweat lodge is of the air red as leaves. He admonishes his people to be strong and responsible, to acknowledge that life is a sizeable endeavor. it.

About this title

About the Author

Diane Hall Glancy, of Cherokee and English/German descent, grew up in Kansas City, MO. She teaches Native American literature and creative writing courses at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Trigger Dance

By Diane Glancy

University of Colorado

Copyright © 1990 Diane Glancy
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-932511-36-2

CHAPTER 1

Anadarko Pow Wow

Whay nah. The old language lodged in their head. For this, then, the young men danced. Kiowa, Caddo, Creek, Chickasaw, Cheyenne, Ponca, Pawnee, Osage, Cherokee.

For this, they danced in headdress & feather bustle, bells & leggings, beaded moccasins & breastplate. Not all of them, no, not the boys walking the fairgrounds snagging girls. They had already dropped into hopelessness. For them, the sun rolled across the plains & off the edge of Oklahoma like a gutter ball.

But the young men in the bright arena danced the buffalo dance, snake dance, straightdance, the fancy war dance, while singers chanted "hey ye hey ye" & beat their drums in the heat.

They danced on the trail up through the black sky where ancestors waited with the bruised face of the moon. Even if their lives were a hole they crawled into, they danced on the great plains of the country with a flag with red stripes of blood.

A pah nuh. They heard the dead language again.

Pin-cushion, all of them.

How had they survived their struggle & defeat? Why hadn't their race folded up & disappeared in the dust where the feet of the young men beat the arena ground?

Nuh hekka.

The warrior moon steadied the dusty haze of the fairgrounds where a stream of cars still drove into the field to park.

Meanwhile the young men strutted in the arena like prairie cocks, looking here, looking there, in step with the drums as though strange ballet dancers or tiptoeing bowlers, vibrant, transcending, in tune with the dead.

CHAPTER 2

Aunt Parnetta's Electric Blisters

Some stories can be told only in the winter. This is not one of them because the fridge is for Parnetta where it's always winter.

1.

Hey chekta! all this and now the refrigerator broke. Uncle Filo scratched the long gray hairs that hung in a tattered braid on his back. All that foot stomping and fancy dancing. Old warriors still at it. But when did it help? Aunt Parnetta asked. The fridge ran all through the cold winter when she could have set the milk and eggs in the snow. The fish and meat from the last hunt. The fridge had walked through the spring when she had her quilt and beading money. Now her penny jar was empty and it was hot and the glossy white box broke. The coffin! If grandpa died, they could put him in it with his war ax and tomahawk. His old dog even. But how would she get a new fridge?

The repairman said he couldn't repair it. Whee choo tun. Filo loaded his shotgun and sent a bullet right through it. Well, he said, a man had to take revenge. Had to stand against civilization. He watched the summer sky for change as though the stars were white leaves across the hill. Would the stars fall? Would Filo have to rake them when cool weather came again? Filo coughed and scratched his shirt pocket as though something crawled deep within his breastbone. His heart maybe, if he ever found it.

Aunt Parnetta stood at the sink, soaking the sheets before she washed them.

"Dern't nothin' we dud ever werk?" Parnetta asked, poling the sheets with her stick.

"We bought that ferge back twenty yars," Filo told her. "And it nerked since then."

"Weld, derned," she answered. "Could have goned longer til the frost cobered us. Culb ha' set the milk ertside. But nowd. It weren't werk that far."

"Nope," Filo commented. "It weren't."

Parnetta looked at her beadwork. Her hands flopped at her sides. She couldn't have it done for a long time. She looked at the white patent-leathery box. Big enough for the both of them. For the cow if it died.

"Set it out in the backyard with the last one we had."

They drove to Tahlequah that afternoon, Filo's truck squirting dust and pinging rocks.

They parked in front of the hardware store on Muskogee Street. The regiments of stoves, fridges, washers, dryers, stood like white soldiers. The Yellow Hair Custer was there to command them. Little Big Horn. Whu chutah! The prices! Three hundred crackers.

"Some mord than thad," Filo surmised, his flannel shirt-collar tucked under itself, his braid sideways like a rattler on his back.

"Filo, I dern't think we shulb decide terday."

"No," the immediate answer stummed from his mouth like a roach from under the baseboard in the kitchen.

"We're just lookin'."

"Of course," said Custer.

They walked to the door leaving the stoves, washers, dryers, the televisions all blaring together, and the fridges lined up for battle.

Filo lifted his hand from the rattled truck.

"Surrender," Parnetta said. "Izend thad the way id always iz?"

The truck spurted and spattered and shook Filo and Aunt Parnetta before Filo got it backed into the street. The forward gear didn't buck as much as the backward.

When they got home, Filo took the back off the fridge and looked at the motor. It could move a load of hay up the road if it had wheels. Could freeze half the fish in the pond. The minute coils, the twisting intestines of the fridge like the hog he butchered last winter, also with a bullet hole in its head.

"Nothin' we dude nerks." Parnetta watched him from the kitchen window. "Everythin' against uz," she grumbled to herself.

Filo got his war feather from the shed, put it in his crooked braid. He stomped his feet, hooted. Filo, the medicine man, transcended to the spirit world for the refrigerator. He shook each kink and bolt. The spirit of cold itself. He whooped and warred in the yard for nearly half an hour.

"Not with a bullet hole in it," Parnetta shook her head and wiped the sweat from her face.

He got his wrench and hack saw, the axe and hammer. It was dead now for sure. Parnetta knew it at the sink. It was the thing that would be buried in the backyard. "Like most of us libed," Aunt Parnetta talked to herself. "Filled with our own workings, not doint what we shulb."

Parnetta hung the sheets in the yard, white and square as the fridge itself.

2.

The new refrigerator came in a delivery truck. It stood in the kitchen. Bought on time at a bargain. Cheapest in the store. Filo made sure of it. The interest over five years would be as much as the fridge. Aunt Parnetta tried to explain it to him. The men set the fridge where Parnetta instructed them. They adjusted and leveled the little hog feet. They gave Parnetta the packet of information, the guarantee. Then drove off in victory. The new smell of the gleaming white inside as though cleansed by cedar from the Keetowah fire.

Aunt Parnetta had Filo take her to the grocery store on the old road to Tahlequah. She loaded the cart with milk and butter. Frozen waffles. Orange juice. Anything that had to be kept cool. The fridge made noise, she thought, she would get used to it. But in the night, she heard the fridge. It seemed to fill her dreams. She had trouble going to sleep, even on the clean white sheets, and she had trouble staying asleep. The fridge was like a giant hog in the kitchen. Rutting and snorting all night. She got up once and unpluggedit. Waking early the next morning to plug it in again before the milk and eggs got warm.

"That ferge bother yeu, Filo?" she asked.

"Nord."

Aunt Parnetta peeled her potatoes outside. She mended Filo's shirts under the shade tree. She didn't soak anything in the kitchen sink anymore, not even the sheets or Filo's socks. There just were things she had to endure, she grumped. That's the way it was.

When the grandchildren visited, she had them run in the kitchen for whatever she needed. They picnicked on the old watermelon table in the backyard. She put up the old teepee for them to sleep in.

"Late in the summer fer that?" Filo quizzed her.

"Nert. It waz nert to get homesick for the summer that's leabing us like the childurn." She gratified him with her keen sense. Parnetta could think up anything for what she wanted to do.

Several nights Filo returned to their bed with its geese-in-flight-over-the-swamp pattern quilt, but Aunt Parnetta stayed in the teepee under the stars.

"We bined muried thurdy yars. Git in the house," Filo said one night under the white leaves of the stars.

"I can't sleep cause of that wild hog in the kitchen," Aunt Parnetta said. "I tald yeu that."

"Hey chekta!" Filo answered her. "Why didn't yeu teld me so I knowd whad yeu said." Filo covered the white box of the fridge with the geese quilt and an old Indian blanket he got from the shed. "Werd yeu stayed out thar all winder?"

"Til the beast we got in thar dies."

"Hawly gizard," Filo spurted. "Thard be anuther twendy yars!"

Aunt Parnetta was comforted by the bedroom that night. Old Filo's snore after he made his snorting love to her. The gray and blue striped wallpaper with its watermarks. The stove pipe curling up to the wall like a hog tail. The bureau dresser with a little doily and her hairbrush. Pictures by their grandchildren. A turquoise coyote and a ghostly figure the boy told her was Running Wind.

She fell into a light sleep where the white stars blew down from the sky, flapping like the white sheets on the line. She nudged Filo to get his rake. He turned sharply against her. Parnetta woke and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Yeu wand me to cuber the furge wid something else?" Filo asked from his sleep.

"No," Aunt Parnetta answered him. "Nod unless id be the polar ice cap."

3.

Now it was an old trip to Minnesota when she was a girl. Parnetta saw herself in a plaid shirt and braids. Had her hair been that dark? Now it was streaked with gray. Everything was like a child's drawing. Exaggerated. The way dreams were sometimes. A sun in the left corner of the picture. The trail of chimney smoke from the narrow house. It was cold. So cold that everything creaked. She heard cars running late into the night. Early mornings, steam growled out of the exhaust. The pane of window-glass in the front door had been somewhere else. Old lettering showed up in the frost. Bones remembered their aches in the cold. Teeth, their hurt. The way Parnetta remembered every bad thing that happened. She dwelled on it.

The cold place was shriveled to the small upright rectangle in her chest, holding the fish her grandson caught in the river. That's where the cold place was. Right inside her heart. No longer pumping like the blinker lights she saw in town. She was the Minnesota winter she remembered as a child. The electricity it took to keep her cold! The energy. The moon over her like a ceiling light. Stars were holes where the rain came in. The dripping buckets. All of them like Parnetta. The hurrrrrrrrrr of the fridge. Off. On. All night. That white box. Wild boar! Think of it. She didn't always know why she was disgruntled. She just was. She saw herself as the fridge. A frozen fish stiff as a brick. The Great Spirit had her pegged. Could she find her heart, maybe, if she looked somewhere in her chest?

Hurrrrrrrr. Rat-tat-at-rat. Hurrr. The fridge came on again, and startled, she woke and teetered slightly on the edge of the bed while it growled.

But she was a stranger in this world. An Indian in a white man's land. "Even the furge's whate," Parnetta told the Great Spirit.

"Wasn't everybody a stranger and pilgrim?" The Great Spirit seemed to speak to her, or it was her own thoughts wandering in her head.

"No," Parnetta insisted. Some people were at home on this earth, moving with ease. She would ask the Great Spirit more about it later. When he finally yanked the life out of her like the pin in a grenade.

Suddenly Parnetta realized that she was always moaning like the fridge. Maybe she irritated the Great Spirit like the white box irritated her. Did she sound that way to anyone else? Was that the Spirit's revenge? She was stuck with the cheapest box in the store. In fact, in her fears, wasn't it a white boar that would tear into the room and eat her soon as she got good and asleep?

Hadn't she seen the worst in things? Didn't she weigh herself in the winter with her coat on? Sometimes wrapped in the blanket also?

"Filo?" She turned to him. But he was out cold. Farther away than Minnesota.

"No. Just think about it, Parnetta," her thoughts seemed to say. The Spirit had blessed her life. But inside the white refrigerator of herself — inside the coils, an ice river surged. A glacier mowed its way across a continent. Everything frozen for eons. In need of a Keetowah fire. Heat. The warmth of the Great Spirit. Filo was only a spark. He could not warm her. Even though he tried.

Maybe the Great Spirit had done her a favor. Hope like white sparks of stars glistened in her head. The electric blisters. TEMPORARY! She could shut up. She belonged to the Spirit. He had just unplugged her a minute. Took his shotgun right through her head.

The leaves growled and spewed white sparks in the sky. It was a volcano from the moon. Erupting in the heavens. Sending down its white sparklers like the pinwheels Filo used to nail on trees. It was the bright sparks of the Keetowah fire, the holy bonfire from which smaller fires burned, spreading the purification of the Great Spirit into each house. Into each hard, old pinecone heart.

CHAPTER 3

Keyo

The July sun flattened the prairie to a table where Keyo sat in the school house when he was in trouble. He was the oldest in class and still couldn't read. The words moved under his eyes and nothing happened. They might as well be bats or ghosts that swooped over the cabin at night. He was never sure.

The teacher looked from the window again. She sighed and wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. She showed him the consonants. This week it was r. He had to read the words that started with r and listen to the first sound in each word. Red, rabbit, reason, READ! Then the teacher gave him syllables. Ble, dle, ple, gle. After that he had to read a paragraph and answer her questions. But he never knew what the answers were because he couldn't read the paragraph.

The teacher showed him his vocabulary words for the next week. They were black spots on the page with the power of buckshot. Stronger than he was. How he wished he were in his brothers' truck. If only they could get it started, they would ride to Chickasha, Oklahoma, and get drunk for the night. When the woman got up and left the room, Keyo closed the book.

The whole earth roasted. The red soil plowed up for corn, it shuddered in fields, clapping its stupid hands. The sun always ran out of the southwest, across the plains, never stopping, like wind, like the white man. No, Indians were behind the margin of the paper. All the words moved on the page, flicked under his eyes. They were the far away city and he was outside. His brothers had gone and come back. No matter how many winters and summers Keyo spent in school, he knew he wouldn't make it either.

Outside the window, he saw a corncrib on stilts, fields changing every day with heat, the glare of sky. How could he sit in class all his life and not know anything? How could the words, small rodents that they were, run away from him and burrow into the page? Sometimes he saw nothing but a dull glare from the book.

Keyo had to stay at the table because he punched a boy who insulted him — called him a stupid slug. A slow slug. Did it matter? Keyo's body filled with power that could ride a horse across the prairie, or endure the vision quest. Keyo had to hit. It was the only thing he could do — he let his anger fly like an arrow into a buffalo. Now the kid was in the clinic with a broken face.

Perhaps if words were rabbits running in the field, he could aim his rifle and plug them. Could he think of them in that way and learn to read? No — he looked at the girls as they walked by the window. Their screams on the playground after school sounded like a litter of new animals. Their bodies already fuzzy in places? Their soft hair made Keyo think of other things than the trouble he was in. Not words, no. He didn't think in them. But pictures went through Keyo's mind. For now, he had to sit at the table until they decided what to do with him. He made the school look bad. Its programs and teaching didn't affect him. He should be out in the field working in the corn, or weeding the garden for his mother, or finding his father asleep in some back alley in Calumet.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Trigger Dance by Diane Glancy. Copyright © 1990 Diane Glancy. Excerpted by permission of University of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0932511368
• ISBN 13: 9780932511362
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 137